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Backup strategy for laptop -- will this work?


twwilliams

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I'm thinking about buying Retrospect Pro 6 to backup my Toshiba Tecra 9100. I bought Norton Ghost 2003 since it says it supports external firewire devices, but it appears that is not the case (I have found others with the same problem and no answers from Symantec).

 

 

 

I have two 40GB 2.5-inch drives (one installed in the laptop and one not). I also have an 80GB external firewire hard drive. The laptop has a firewire port, and I am running Windows XP.

 

 

 

Toshiba has an option to purchase an adapter to put a second hard drive in place of the CD-ROM drive. It is possible to boot from this drive.

 

 

 

Here is my plan:

 

 

 

(1) Periodically (once a week, once every two weeks), use Ghost to image the active drive to the backup 2.5" drive in the second bay.

 

(2) Run a backup daily to to the external firewire drive.

 

(3) In the event of a massive failure of the active 2.5" drive, install the standby drive in the main port and boot from it, run Retrospect, and restore from the last backup on the Firewire drive.

 

(4) Purchase another backup 2.5" drive.

 

 

 

Will this get me back to exactly where my system was as of the time of the last Retrospect backup? Or will I need to purchase the second 2.5" 40GB drive first, put it in the second bay, restore to it from Retrospect running from the backup, and then put it in the laptop?

 

 

 

I'm sorry if this is confusing, but I'm trying to figure out how to do this properly. I don't want to run Ghost every day, for a couple of reasons: (1) it's slow; and, (2) that's a lot of activity on both my 2.5" drives every day.

 

 

 

I would like to have the convenience of Retrospect's incremental backups (not to mention the proper firewire support) with the lower down time of a Ghost-imaged hard drive.

 

 

 

Will this work? Am I missing anything? I need to determine these thing before I purchase the product.

 

 

 

Thank you for any advice or suggestions.

 

 

 

-- Tommy

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An easier approach might be to use the Disaster Recovery features in Retrosepct 6.0 Professional, which allows you to create a bootable CD, and do a complete system restore while booted from that CD.

 

 

 

When restoring to a new hard disk you may need to deal with the following issues described in this document:

 

 

 

http://www.dantz.com/index.php3?SCREEN=kbase&ACTION=KBASE&id=27343

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Your system would be OK if you insist on being able to flip to the second ghosted HD and use it *immediately* (perhaps after an additional Retro restore step for more recent file changes). However you'll be running without a second HD at that point.

 

 

 

An alternate approach (and the one I use) is to not ghost the entire C: ==1-to-1==> D: but rather ghost to a compressed *image* file on the second D: drive. If you've made your D: drive bootable (e.g. minimal W2K, firewire drivers and Retro installed), you'll be able to boot from that drive and restore the main drive (after a reformat or replace) from the ghosted image and/or the Retro backup. Actually doing a ghost restore followed by a Retro restore is probably the quickest way to get things back up again (quicker and easier than the DR process). Once you have a Ghost image your probably don't need to keep it very up-to-date since you can rely on Retro for the later.

 

 

 

As an additional benefit of only ghosting to an image, you may have enough space on the D: drive to use it for Retro backups (faster, always present even if you take your laptop on the road). You could still use your 80G firewire drive for additional "off-site" backups but maybe you would need to back up to that drive less frequently if you're already doing daily backups to the D: drive.

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I figured that out later last night -- I thought Disaster Recovery was a $599 add-on -- and I went ahead and bought it.

 

 

 

I ran the backup, but I got 170 errors. There were a bunch of -1101 errors (file/directory not found) in the c:\WINDOWS\Prefetch directory.

 

 

 

Then there were many that didn't compare in the verification stage. Some samples:

 

 

 

File "C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT": didn't compare at offset 102 in stream ":CA_INOCULATEIT:DATA"

 

File "C:\WINDOWS\Driver Cache\INFCACHE.1": didn't compare at offset 102 in stream ":CA_INOCULATEIT:DATA"

 

File "C:\WINDOWS\inf\1394.PNF": didn't compare at offset 102 in stream ":CA_INOCULATEIT:DATA"

 

File "C:\WINDOWS\system32\CatRoot\{F750E6C3-38EE-11D1-85E5-00C04FC295EE}\fp4.cat": didn't compare at offset 102 in stream ":CA_INOCULATEIT:DATA"

 

 

 

I'm not sure whether I could restore from this backup or not, but I'll try again tonight with the eTrust Virus RealTime Monitor disabled (which I forgot to do).

 

 

 

I also had System Restore still enabled, so I that could be the Prefetch problems.

 

 

 

One question: is it possible to boot from a Disaster Recovery CD and use that to do a backup? That should eliminate any open files on the disk. I could then create another Disaster Recovery CD from that backup.

 

 

 

Thank you for your help.

 

 

 

-- Tommy

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